Population, Poverty, and the Local
Environment

by Partha S. Dasgupta

Editor's Note: Each fall the ISU Bioethics
Program sponsors a Fall Colloquium. On Tuesday 25 October 1994 we
were honored to welcome to the podium Professor Partha Dasgupta, who
is Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at Cambridge University, to
speak about ethics and population. After speaking at Iowa State,
Professor Dasgupta traveled to Urbana, Illinois, and delivered the
lecture at the University of Illinois bioethics colloquium. The
lecture he delivered on those occasions became the basis of an
article later printed in Scientific American vol. 272, no. 2
(Feb 1995): 26-31. We are grateful to the editors of that journal for
permission to reprint the text.

As with politics, we have widely differing opinions about
population growth s the cause of poverty and environmental
degradation. Others would permute the elements of this causal chain,
arguing, for example, that poverty is the cause rather than the
consequence of increasing numbers. Yet even when studying the
semiarid regions of sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent,
economists have typically not regarded poverty, population growth and
the local environment as interconnected. Inquiry into each factor has
in large measure gone along its own narrow route, with discussion of
their interactions dominated by popular writings - which, although
often illuminating, are in the main descriptive and not
analytical.

Over the past several years, though, a few investigators have
studied the relations between these ingredients more closely. Our
approach fuses theoretical modeling with empirical findings drawn
from a number of disciplines, such as anthropology, demography,
ecology, economics, nutrition and political science. Focusing on the
vast numbers of small, rural communities in the poorest of regions of
the world, the work has identified circumstances in which population
growth, poverty, and degradation of local resources often fuel one
another. The collected research has shown that none of the three
elements directly causes the other two; rather each influences, and
is in turn influenced by, the others. This new perspective has
significant implications for policies aimed at improving life for
some of the world's most impoverished inhabitants.

In contrast with this new perspective, with its focus on local
experience, popular tracts on the environment and population growth
have usually taken a global view. They have emphasized the
deleterious effects that a large populations would have on our planet
in the distant future. Although that slant has its uses, it has drawn
attention away from the economic misery endemic today. Disaster is
not something the poorest have to wait for: it is occurring even now.
Besides, in developing countries, decisions on whether to have a
child and on how to share education, food, work, health care and
local resources are in large measure made within small entities such
as households. So it makes sense to study the link between poverty,
population growth and the environment from a myriad of local, even
individual, viewpoints.

The household assumes various guises in different parts of the
world. Some years ago Gary S. Becker of the University of Chicago was
the first investigator to grapple with this difficulty. He used an
idealized version of the concept to explore how choices made within a
household would respond to changes in the outside world, such as
employment opportunities and availability of credit, insurance,
health care and education.

One problem with his method, as I saw it when I began my own work
some five years ago, was that it studied households in isolation; it
did not investigate the dynamics between interacting units. In
addition to understanding the forces that encouraged couples to favor
large families, I wanted to understand the ways in which a reasoned
decision to have children, made by each household, could end up being
detrimental to all households.

In studying how such choices are made, I found a second problem
with the early approach: by assuming that the decision making was
shared equally by adults, investigators had taken an altogether
benign view of the process. Control over a family's choices is, after
all, often held unequally. If I wanted to understand how decisions
were made, I would have to know who was doing the deciding.

Power and Gender

Those who enjoy the greatest power within a family can often be
identified by the way the household's resources are divided. Judith
Bruce of the Population Council, Mayra Buvinic of the International
Center for Research on Women, Lincoln C. Chen and Amartya Sen of
Harvard University and others have observed that the sharing of
resources within a household is often unequal even when the
differences in needs are taken into account. In poor households in
the Indian subcontinent, for example, men and boys usually get more
sustenance than do women and girls, and the elderly get less than the
young.

Such inequities prevail over fertility choices as well. Here also
men wield more influence, even though women typically bear the
greater cost. To grasp how great the burden can be, consider the
number of live babies a woman would normally have if she managed to
survive through her childbearing years. This number, called the total
fertility rate, is between six and eight in the sub-Saharan Africa.
Each successful birth there involves at least a year and a half of
pregnancy and breast-feeding. So in a society where female life
expectancy at birth is 50 years and the fertility rate is, say,
seven, nearly half a woman's adult life is spent either carrying a
child in her womb or breast-feeding it. And this calculation does not
allow for unsuccessful pregnancies.

Another indicator of the price that woman pay is the maternal
mortality. In most poor countries, complications related to pregnancy
constitute the largest single cause of death of women in their
reproductive years. In some parts of sub-Saharan Africa as many as
one woman dies for every 50 live births. (The rate in Scandinavia
today is one per 20,000.) At a total fertility rate of seven or more,
the chance that a woman entering her reproductive years will not live
through them is about one in six. Producing children therefore
involves playing a kind of Russian roulette.

Given such a high cost of procreation, one expects that women,
given a choice, would opt for fewer children. But are birth rate in
fact highest in societies where women have the least power within the
family? Data on the status of women from the 79 so- called Third
World countries display an unmistakable pattern: high fertility, high
rates of illiteracy, low share of paid employment and high percentage
working at home for no pay - they all hang together. From the
statistics alone it is difficult to discern which of these factors
are causing, and which are merely correlated with high fertility. But
the findings are consistent with the possibility that lack of paid
employment and education limits a woman's ability to make decisions
and therefore promotes population growth.

There is also good reason to think that lack of income- generating
employment reduces women's power more directly then does lack of
education. Such an insight has implications for policy. It is all
well and good, for example, to urge governments in poor countries to
invest in literacy programs. But the results could be disappointing.
Many factors militate against poor households' taking advantage of
subsidized education. If children are needed to work inside and
outside the home, then keeping them in school (even a cheap one) is
costly. In patrilineal societies, educated girls can also be
perceived as less pliable and harder to marry off. Indeed, the
benefits of subsidies to even primary education are reaped
disproportionately by families that are better off.

In contrast, policies aimed at increasing women's productivity at
home and improving their earnings in the marketplace would directly
empower them, especially within the family. Greater earning power for
women would also raise for men the implicit costs of procreation
(which keeps women from bringing in cash income). This is not to deny
the value of public investment in primary and secondary education in
developing countries. It is only to say we should be wary of claims
that such investment is a panacea for the population problem.

The importance of gender inequality to overpopulation in poor
nations is fortunately gaining international recognition. Indeed, the
United Nations Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo
in September 1994 emphasized women's reproductive rights and the
means by which they could be protected and promoted. But there is
more to the population problem than gender inequalities. Even when
both parents participate in the decision to have a child, there are
several pathways through with the choice becomes harmful to the
community. These routes have been uncovered by inquiring into the
various motives for procreation.

Little Hands Help....

One motive, common to humankind, relates to children as ends in
themselves. It ranges from the desire to have children because they
are playful and enjoyable, to the desire to obey the dictates of
tradition and religion. Once such injunction emanates from the cult
of the ancestor, which, taking religion to be the act of reproducing
the lineage, requires women to bear many children [see "High
Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa," by John C. Caldwell and Pat
Caldwell; Scientific American, May 1990].

Such traditions are often perpetuated by imitative behavior.
Procreation in closely knit communities is not only a private matter;
it is also a social activity, influenced by the cultural milieu.
Often there are norms encouraging high fertility rates that no
household desires unilaterally to break. (These norms may well have
outlasted any rationale they had in the past.) Consequently, so long
as all others aim at large families, no household on its own will
wish to deviate. Thus, a society can get stuck at a self-sustaining
mode of behavior that is characterized by high fertility and low
educational attainment.

This does not mean that society will live with it forever. As
always, people differ in the extent to which they adhere to
tradition. Inevitably some, for one reason or another, will
experiment, take risks and refrain from joining the crowd. They are
the nonconformists, and they help to lead the way. An increase in the
female literacy could well trigger such a process.

Still other motives for procreation involve viewing children as
productive assets. In a rural economy where avenues for saving are
highly restricted, parents value children as a source of security in
their old age. Mead Cain, previously at the Population Council,
studied this aspect extensively. Less discussed, at least until
recently, is another kind of motivation, explored by John C. Caldwell
of the Australian National University, Marc L. Nerlove of the
University of Maryland and Anke S. Meyer of the World Bank and by
Karl-Goran Maler of the Beijer International Institute of Ecological
Economics in Stockholm and me. It stems from children's being
valuable to their parents not only for future income but also as a
source of current income.

Third World countries are, for the most part, subsistence
economies. The rural folk eke out a living by using products gleaned
directly from plants and animals. Much labor is needed even for
simple tasks. In addition, poor rural households do not have access
to modern sources of domestic energy or tap water. In semiarid and
arid regions the water supply may not even be nearby. Nor is fuelwood
at hand when the forests recede. In addition to cultivating crops,
caring for livestock, cooking food and producing simple marketable
products, members of a household may have to spend as much as five to
six hours a day fetching water and collecting fodder and wood.

Children, then, are needed as workers even when their parents are
in their prime. Small households are simply not viable; each one
needs many hands. In parts of India, children between 10 and 15 years
have been observed to work as much as one and a half times the number
of hours that adult males do. By the age of six, children in rural
India tend domestic animals and care for younger siblings, fetch
water and collect firewood, dung and fodder. It may well be that the
usefulness of each extra hand increases with declining availability
of resources, as measured by, say, the distance to sources of fuel
and water.

...But a Hidden Cost

The need for many hands can lead to a destructive situation,
especially when parents do not have to pay the full price of rearing
their children but share those costs with the community. In recent
years, mores that once regulated the use of local resources have
changed. Since time immemorial, rural assets such as village ponds
and water holes, threshing grounds, grazing fields, and local forests
have been owned communally. This form of control enabled households
in semiarid regions to pool their risks. Elinor Ostrom of Indiana
University and others have shown that communities have protected such
local commons against over exploitation by invoking norms, imposing
fines for deviant behavior and so forth.

But the very process of economic development can erode traditional
methods of control. Increased urbanization and mobility can do so as
well. Social rules are also endangered by civil strife and by the
takeover of resources by landowners or the state. As norms degrade,
parents pass some of the costs of children on to the community by
overexploiting the commons. If access to shared resources continues,
parents produce too many children, which leads to greater crowding
and susceptibility to disease as well as to more pressure on
environmental resources. But no household, on its own, takes into
account the harm it inflicts on others when bringing forth another
child.

Parental costs of procreations are also lower when relatives
provide a helping hand. Although the price of carrying a child is
paid by the mother, the cost of rearing the child is often shared
among the kinship. Caroline H. Bledsoe of Northwestern University and
others have observed that in much of sub-Saharan Africa fosterage is
commonplace, affording a form of insurance protection in semiarid
regions. In parts of West Africa about a third of the children have
been found to be living with their kin at any given time. Nephews and
nieces have the same rights of accommodation and support as do
biological offspring. In recent work I have shown that this
arrangement encourages couples to have too many offspring if the
parents' share of the benefits from having children exceeds their
share of the costs.

In addition, where conjugal bonds are weak, as they are in
sub-Saharan Africa, fathers often do not bear the costs of siring a
child. Historical demographers, such as E. A. Wrigley of the
University of Cambridge, have noted a significant difference between
western Europe in the 18th century and modern preindustrial
societies. In the former, marriage normally meant establishing a new
household. This requirement led to late marriages; it also meant that
parents bore the cost of rearing their children. Indeed, fertility
rates in France dropped before mortality rates registered a decline,
before modern family-planning techniques became available and before
women became literate.

The perception of both the low costs and high benefits of
procreation induces households to produce too many children. In
certain circumstances a disastrous process can begin. As the
community's resources are depleted, more hands are needed to gather
fuel and water for daily use. More children are then produced,
further damaging the local environment and in turn providing the
household with an incentive to enlarge. When this happens, fertility
and environmental degradation reinforces each other in an escalating
spiral. By the time some countervailing set of factors - whether
public policy or diminished benefits from having addition children -
stops the spiral, millions of lives may have suffered through
worsening poverty.

Recent findings by the World Bank on sub-Saharan Africa have
revealed positive correlations among poverty, fertility and
deterioration of the local environment. Such data cannot reveal
causal connections, but they do support the idea of a positive-
feedback process such as I have described. Over time, the effect of
this spiral can be large, as manifested by battles for resources
[see "Environmental Change and Violent Conflict," by T. F. Homer-
Dixon, J. H. Boutwell and G. W. Rathjens; Scientific American,
February 1993].

The victims hit hardest among those who survive are society's
outcasts - the migrants and the dispossessed, some of whom in the
course of time become the emaciated beggars seen on the streets of
large towns and cities in underdeveloped countries. Historical
studies by Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago and
theoretical explorations by Debraj Ray of Boston University and me,
when taken together, show that the spiral I have outlined here is one
way in which destitutes are created. Emaciated beggars are not lazy;
they have to husband their precarious hold on energy. Having suffered
from malnutrition they cease to be marketable.

Families with greater access to resources are, however, in a
position to limit their size and propel themselves into still higher
income levels. It is my impression that among the urban middle
classes in northern India, the transition to a lower fertility rate
has already been achieved. India provides an example of how the
vicious cycle I have described can enable extreme poverty to persist
amid a growth in well-being in the rest of society. The Matthew
effect - "Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that
which he hath" - works relentlessly in impoverished countries.

Breaking Free

This analysis suggests that the way to reduce fertility is to
break the destructive spiral. Parental demand for children rather
than an unmet need for contraceptives in large measure explains
reproductive behavior in developing countries. We should therefore
try to identify policies that will change the options available to
men and women so that couples choose to limit the number of offspring
they produce.

In this regard, civil liberties, as opposed to coercion, play a
particular role. Some years ago my colleague Martin R. Weale and I
showed through statistical analysis that even in poor countries
political and civil liberties go together with improvements in other
aspects of life, such as income per person, life expectancy at birth
and infant survival rate. Thus, there are now reasons for thinking
that such liberties are not only desirable in themselves but also
empower people to flourish economically. Recently Adam Przeworski of
the University of Chicago demonstrated that fertility, as well, is
lower in countries where citizens enjoy more civil and political
freedom. (An exception is China, which represents only one country
out of many in the analysis.)

The most potent solution in semiarid regions of sub-Saharan Africa
and the Indian subcontinent is to deploy a number of policies
simultaneously. Family planning services, and measures that empower
women are certainly helpful. As societal norms break down and
traditional support systems falter, those women who choose to change
their behavior become financially and socially more vulnerable. so a
literacy and employment drive for women is essential to smooth the
transition to having fewer children.

But improving social coordination and directly increasing the
economic security of the poor are also essential. Providing cheap
fuel and potable water will reduce the usefulness of extra hands.
When a child becomes perceived as expensive, we may finally have a
hope of dislodging the rapacious hold of high fertility rates.

Each of the prescriptions suggested by our new perspective on the
links between population, poverty and environmental degradation is
desirable by itself, not just when we have those problems in mind. It
seems to me that this consonance of means and ends is a most
agreeable fact in what is otherwise a depressing field of study.

Further reading

Partha Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution.
Oxford University Press, 1993.